Archives for January 2015

“Leading Christians have lent moral backing to military action against the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS), citing the Just War doctrine. Christian pacifists, meanwhile, have struggled to suggest convincing alternatives at a time when preaching nonviolence can seem naïve, even heartless. But does the Just War tradition give its adherents a blank check in such a situation?

“We turned to Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action and a dean among Christian pacifists, who lately has been talking about a truce with Just War Christians – while challenging all of us to go beyond easy answers.”

Read the rest of “Does ISIS Prove Nonviolence Wrong?: Making Peace with Just Warriors: An Interview with Ron Sider” here.

Psalm 111 is an acrostic where each clause begins with a subsequent letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

It focuses on the beauty and glory of God, celebrating God’s greatness and goodness and emphasizing both God’s covenant love (vv. 5, 9) and commands (v. 7).

The psalm culminates by asserting the powerful interrelationship between worship and wisdom (v. 10), challenging any attempt to pursue practical advice for life apart from the worship of God.

Prayer for reflection:Holy and generous God, giver of every good gift,
inspire in our hearts a desire for wisdom that begins with reverence for you.
Expand in our minds the knowledge of your Word,
and fill us with the love of your Son, Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.

What good would it do for three kayaks, three canoes, and a rubber dinghy to paddle into the path of a Pakistani steamship? For a tiny ﬁshing boat with unarmed, praying Americans aboard to sail toward an American battleship threatening Nicaragua? For an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair to stop in front of advancing Filipino tanks? Or for nonviolent protesters to defy the Communist rulers of the Soviet Empire?

Soviet Communism collapsed. The tanks stopped, and a nonviolent revolution succeeded. The American battleship left, and the threat of invasion faded. And the US shipment of arms to Pakistan stopped.

Those are just a few of the many dramatic successes of nonviolent confrontation in the last several decades. Everyone, of course, knows how Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution defeated the British Empire and how Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful civil rights crusade changed American history. There have been scores upon scores of instances of nonviolent victories over dictatorship and oppression in the past one hundred years. In fact, Dr. Gene Sharp, the foremost scholar of nonviolence today, has said that the twentieth century saw a remarkable expansion of the substitution of nonviolent struggle for violence. More recent scholarship has not only conﬁrmed Sharp’s comment but also shown that nonviolent revolutions against injustice and dictatorship are actually more successful than violent campaigns.

Surely these facts suggest a crucial area of urgent exploration in the twenty-ﬁrst century. The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. No one who lived through or studies that vicious century needs to be reminded of the horror of war and violence. A violent sword killed more than two hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. One scholar estimates that eighty-six million people died in wars fought between 1900 and 1989. That means two thousand ﬁve hundred people every day, one hundred people every hour, for ninety years. Genocide and mass murder by governments killed approximately one hundred twenty million more.

The mushroom cloud reminds us of greater agony yet to come unless we ﬁnd alternative ways to resolve international conﬂict. A method that destroys more than two hundred million people in one century and threatens to wipe out far more is hardly a model of success. For all of us, from the ordinary layperson to the most highly placed military general, it is obvious that the search for peaceful alternatives is a practical necessity.

It is also a moral demand. Christians in the Just War tradition (a majority since the fourth century) have always argued that killing must be a last resort. All realistic alternatives must be tried before one resorts to war. After a century in which Gandhi, King, and a host of others demonstrated that nonviolent action works, how can Christians in the Just War tradition claim that the violence they justify is truly a last resort until they have invested billions and trained tens of thousands of people in a powerful, sustained testing of the possibilities of nonviolent alternatives?

Paciﬁsts have long claimed that there is an alternative to violence. How can their words have integrity unless they are ready to risk death in a massive nonviolent confrontation with the bullies and tyrants who swagger through human history?

In short, the concrete victories of modern nonviolent campaigns, the spiraling dangers of lethal weapons, and the moral demands of Christian faith bring into focus a clear imperative. It is time for the Christian church—indeed, all people of faith—to explore, in a more sustained and sophisticated way than ever before in human history, what can be done nonviolently.

“An exploration of complex, age-old questions about suffering and God’s nature leads Billings to extol the beauty of mystery and the limits of human wisdom: ‘humans don’t have an answer to the problem of evil, and we shouldn’t claim that we have one.’

“Along with disclosing his wrenching questions, fears, and hopes, Billings explores ‘the ways in which God’s story intersects with the cancer story.’

“His poignant insight into the role of lament in faithful Christian living makes this a work of both astute scholarship and powerful testimony.”

This excerpt comes from Jonah(BTCB) by Phillip Cary, commenting on Jonah 3:1-5:

So far the Lord’s words to Jonah are almost the same as before (1:2). Just in case we wondered whether Jonah’s escapades had done anything to change the Lord’s intentions, we hear the same word that got the whole story going at the beginning.

Yet there is a slight difference, a clarification perhaps. Jonah is to call to Nineveh, not just call out against her. His voice is to go to these people and get into their ears rather than rising up over them to heaven. We are getting our first hint that Jonah’s message to Nineveh is not to be all destruction, despite our first impressions.

Once again the word of the Lord sets everything in motion, but this time in the mode of obedience rather than flight. The will of Jonah is, for the first time in the book, actively conforming to the word of the Lord. At least for a little while we are seeing a new Jonah, the way we expect when one is converted to God and reborn.

But we should also know—and unless we are complete fools, we Christian readers should know this from our own experience—that the reborn self still contains much of the old Adam who was to be drowned in baptism. The story of sin and redemption does not end with rebirth.

So here are the basic facts every theology needs to account for. First, heaven is a place of total perfection, full of light, beauty, and goodness. Nothing impure or unclean can enter there (Rev. 21:27). To enter heaven, we must be completely holy. The book of Hebrews urges us to “pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14 NRSV).

Notice a couple things about this holiness. In the ﬁrst place, it is necessary to see the Lord. It is not optional nor merely a recommendation for “super saints” that the rest of us can ignore. Moreover, even though the persons to whom the author is writing are Christians, he does not assume they are already holy in the sense he has in mind. That is why he urges them to pursue holiness. It is essential to see the Lord, but they do not already possess it, at least not fully.

To use a classic theological term, those in heaven must be fully perfect in character in such a way that they are “impeccable,” which means they can no longer sin. Doing evil must be impossible for the redeemed in heaven.

Now here is the second basic fact. The great majority of persons—all, according to many theological traditions—are far from perfect when they die. This is true despite the fact that they are justiﬁed, forgiven by God, and restored to a right relationship with him. And it is true despite the fact that they have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and made a new creation in Christ. Indeed, this is true even on the assumption that everyone has made at least some progress in the pursuit of holiness, some more than others. The obvious fact remains that most are not completely holy, let alone impeccable, when they die.

So, in brief, here is the question. What do we say about the second of these facts in light of the ﬁrst fact? Well, there are broadly three possibilities. First, we could say that anyone who is less than fully perfect when he or she dies is lost and goes to hell. Second, we could say that God will instantly perfect us at the moment of death as an act of sovereign grace. He could simply zap us and thereby perfect us. Third, we could say that God will continue the sanctiﬁcation process after death with our free cooperation until we are fully and completely perfect.

We can rule out the ﬁrst option rather quickly. It has been held by some Christians but is a tiny minority view, and I shall not consider it any further. The real contest is between options 2 and 3. Option 2 is the view held by most Protestants, and option 3 is held by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and a minority of Protestants.

But either way we go on this matter, we have to have some sort of doctrine of purgatory. Consider this quote from John Fletcher, an Anglican theologian of the eighteenth century: “If we understand by purgatory, the manner in which souls, still polluted with the remains of sin, are, or may be purged from those remains, that they may see a holy God, and dwell with him forever; the question, Which is the true purgatory? is by no means frivolous: for it is the grand inquiry, How shall I be eternally saved? proposed in different expressions.” Fletcher’s point is that every system of theology must have an account of how we are “purged” from the remains of sin.

On the view of most Protestants, this purging takes place in an instant, whereas for Roman Catholics and others, it requires an ongoing process that still requires time. But both views have a doctrine of “purgatory” in the sense that they provide an account of how the remains of sin are purged and we are made completely holy and impeccable in our character.

“Todd Billings is a young theologian who has written a number of very important books in recent years. At the age of 39, however, Billings was diagnosed with a rare form of incurable cancer. With the kind of rich theological exposition that’s become his trademark, Billings puts his theology to work, asking the tough questions in the face of deep physical and spiritual trials. Avoiding the thin and saccharine theology that comes all too easily from evangelicals in times of difficulty, Billings gives us a heartfelt reflection that takes the depths of suffering seriously, but even more so, Rejoicing in Lament looks to the expansive comfort and peace that can only be found in the presence of the Suffering Saviour.”

The twilight scene in which the call story begins could grace a pre-Raphaelite painting: the lights slowly fading from temple and its environs. First we are shown Eli laying up for the night, sleep gathering in his rheumy eyes: “Eli was laid down in his place, and his eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see” (3:2).

The temple is shutting down for the night, and “the lamp of God” is about to be put out “in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was, and Samuel was laid down to sleep” (3:3). “The temple of the Lord” makes us think of Solomon’s Temple, as yet unbuilt, of course, not of a backwoods temple-shrine in Shiloh.

The empirically minded fifth-century Antiochene theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia rightly asks why the psalmist can refer to what is really a tabernacle as a temple and answers that “the tabernacle may be called the temple, the testimony of Kings [i.e., Regum] clearly instructs, since the construction of the temple had not begun at the time”: the Shiloh shrine is temple because the ark of the covenant there domiciled in its tabernacle (Exposition on Psalms 10, in Franke 2005: 210).

Living in the house of the Lord was evidently taken literally: because it characterizes their sleep positions by reference to the temple lamps, we can see that Eli is sleeping in an antechamber to the temple, and Samuel perhaps before the ark. The pre-Raphaelites would enjoy illustrating this because it is lucidly allegorical, representing by the state of visionless sleep that the people are not awake to the presence of God, that “the word of the Lord was precious [or sparse]; there was no open vision” (3:1).

The divine call comes when, at a real and spiritual moment of twilight, “the word of the Lord” is sparse and the light of “open vision” has almost been quenched in the land. The priest himself, the obvious recipient of the call, has become spiritually sluggish (Eli’s “eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see”; 3:2).

The temple light is about to be dimmed: “And ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the Lord” (3:3); then, as the unwitting prophet-to-be is “laid down to sleep” (3:4), God’s word strikes. God’s word is so much an unknown word, a new sign, that neither the boy nor the priest his “father” spontaneously recognize it.

“Few words have the power to chill the soul as does cancer. Combined with terminal, the effect is both exponential and surreal.

“It is trite to say that a cancer diagnosis will change your life. Hearing these words from a doctor is profoundly disorienting, more like an out-of-body experience than a medical judgment. Once the sentence is pronounced over us, like some strange and terrifying sacrament uttered by a priest, we are never the same.

“At age 39, theologian J. Todd Billings was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. In his remarkable book Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Brazos Press), he presents an unflinching look at how life changes after a medical death sentence. In the same tradition as C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Rejoicing in Lament is brave, honest, and probing. But this book has one important difference. Most writers in this genre look at death and dying through the eyes of a family member who survives. Billings surveys the same terrain, but through the lens of someone who is dying, someone whose landscape includes both ‘a narrowed future’ and ‘a spacious place.’ It is territory marked by fog and light, sorrow and joy. Billings wrote the book during various stages of his treatment, and its contours reflect the shape of a journey that isn’t over.”

“Every once in a while a book substantially changes the conversation, and even the posture, of the church. What Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in An Age of Hunger did to change how Christians think about poverty, Nonviolent Action promises to do for how we think about war. This book is for every person who is appalled by evil but conflicted in how to respond to it in a way that honors Jesus, the Prince of Peace. It is not just for pacifists. It is for skeptics, war hawks, liberals, and conservatives—but is not for the faint of heart, for in the end it is a clarion call to take the cross as seriously as we have taken the sword.”
—Shane Claiborne, author, activist, and founding partner of The Simple Way

“Wesley Hill captured my imagination by presenting a vision of friendship—spiritual friendship—that has been our Christian heritage. Each of us who make up the body of Christ will be enriched and our corporate witness to a broader culture enhanced if we can find a way to live into this vision.”
—Mark A. Yarhouse, Rosemarie S. Hughes Endowed Chair and professor of psychology, Regent University

Here two authors with firsthand experience in the justice movement encourage us to ground our call to justice in sound biblical and theological teaching as we engage with the most critical global needs of our time. The authors connect justice to Scripture, the character of God, and the long traditions of the church so that our passion meets perseverance and justice becomes an enduring and integrated part of our life and faith.